I stared at my phone for a while.
Olivia had been told I offered. Olivia was thanking me for something I had not done. And Olivia — who was going to be my sister-in-law, who brought yellow tulips to Sunday dinners, who had been told an incomplete version of my family since before I’d met her — was not the person responsible for the incomplete version.
I texted back: “Can we get coffee this week? There’s something I need to tell you.”
We met on a Saturday morning, at a place Olivia picked, a bakery-adjacent coffee shop with small marble tables and very good cardamom lattes. She came in looking happy to see me, which made the next part harder.
I said, as directly and as kindly as I could, that I wanted to clear something up because I didn’t think it was fair for her to be operating on wrong information. I told her I hadn’t volunteered. I told her the conversation at Sunday dinner had not been a yes. I told her I was still thinking about whether I could help at all, but that she should know her starting assumption wasn’t accurate.
Olivia went quiet. Not upset — or not obviously upset — but the particular quiet of someone rearranging what they thought they knew.
“Did they tell Ethan the same thing?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
She looked at her coffee. Then she said, “I wish I’d known that before we gave them a different number.”
I asked what she meant.